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Wednesday, 21 March 2012

My take on Sichuan Chicken

So I got back
from a trip and all I had were 3 chicken thighs in the freezer, an onion, 3
cloves of garlic, half a bell pepper, half a carrot, a tomato and some beans. This is what I did:

First I sliced
the vegetables and garlic – all pretty finely – the carrot in little julienne
strips, same with the beans. I like to
do all the vegetables first before cutting up the meat to avoid any cross
contamination.

Julienned carrots

Then I cut up
the chicken into half inch or so cubes.
I put it in a bowl with a generous splosh of both soy sauce and fish
sauce together with about a dessert spoonful of a hot chilli jam I had in the
fridge (you could substitute any other sort of chilli sauce or even a few
chilli flakes). Then I added 2 teaspoons
of Sichuan pepper and 2 teaspoons of white peppercorns ( I pounded it all up in
my small mortar and pestle I use for spices) It sat there only for about 15
minutes before cooking – but you could leave it for a couple of hours in the
fridge if you wanted the flavours to meld more.
If you don’t like things too peppery – maybe this isn’t the recipe for
you! Or you could halve the quantity of
pepper.

So to the
cooking. Vegetable oil in the pan – then
a quick fry of the garlic slices, add the meat, once it has coloured a bit, add
some golden syrup or brown sugar (say 1-2 tablespoons). Then add the other vegetable in order from
hardest to softest – ie carrot and onion first followed by the beans and bell
pepper - with the tomato going in only
at the last minute. Right at the end I
added about a spoonful of limoncello (a lemon liqueur which I bought at duty
free) – but a bit of lemon juice or lemon zest would work just as well.

Limoncello

While this is
all cooking – and it only takes about 15 minutes all up – cook some noodles or
rice. I did noodles this time.

Serve by
putting the roughly drained noodles into a large bowl, add the chicken mixture,
sprinkle a bit of chopped parsley (or any other fresh green herb) on top along
with some crispy onion (you can buy this from Asian stores – an optional extra
would be fine without it). The photo of
this dish was taken before I put the crispy onions on because I almost forgot
them. It turned out really delicious
which is why I thought I would share it with you.

You might also be interested in this post on making jam (or jelly). If so, click here

If you liked this post, it would be great if you shared it with your readers. You just have to click on one of the buttons underneath the post. They make it easy for you to email, blog, tweet, Facebook or Google +1. Thank you so much for reading my post.

Carole, thanks for stopping by my blog and commenting. You do have a very tasty chicken dish that we would love. I chuckled when I saw you were from New Zealand. We have been talking about selling our home, putting everything in storage and spending 1/2 year in France and then the rest of the year in New Zealand. Have not been there, but my husband is a fly fisherman, and you know what that means. Maybe, we will see you someday. smiling.......

I love this kind of meal -- putting together something fabulous with what I have on hand. Good job. Oh, and thanks for the limoncello tip. Funny that I cook with a lot of liqueurs but I'm not sure I ever reached for my limoncello. I will next time. :)

Marg, I accidentally deleted your kind comment - sorry. Am having to use my new iPad to do comments since my pc failed yesterday - hard disk error. And I don't quite know how to do things right on the iPad yet. Hopefuully, I will get a new laptop today!